now, last night, a former cia officer, robert bear, was speaking to anderson cooper. he described what the use of sarin could do. here's more of what he had to say. >> one round and the dispersion on that could be -- depends on the wind -- but you could take out, let's say a city like homs, you could take out a third of the city in the first couple of hours. anderson, this is a highly toxic liquid. it's a persistent agent. it's absolutely completely deadly. >> reporter: now, we've heard repeatedly from u.s. administration officials, u.s. president barack obama, u.s. secretary of state hillary clinton that the use of chemical weapons in syria was a red line for which syria and the bashar al assad regime would face severe consequences if they ever did cross that red line and utilize chemical weapons against the people of syria. >> and we have no idea what those severe consequences would be, right? >> reporter: that's right, we don't. you know, people speculate that this would mean some type of military intervention, but we also know that a lot of world powers have not w